Currency Basket ETFs

C

cianc

Guest
With the general uncertainty around the Euro I've been reading up in the forums about opening moving to alternate currencies.
Since I'm really interested in stability not profit I was thinking about currency basket ETFs.
What do people think? Are there any you'd recommend?
 
Research conducted on exchange rates found the same random walk phenomenon as found in the stock market. Exchange rates move unpredictably. Currency exposure tends to increase the volatility of a portfolio and this is especially true in the bond markets.

At the same time there is no reliable evidence to suggest that the expected return of exchange rates (assuming monies are invested in short-term currency deposits) is generally anything other than zero.

To test this, I created an equally weighted portfolio of 12 currencies compared to the US$ for the period Jan 1970 to March 2010 and compared the performance of this to US Treasury Bills and Long-Term Government Bonds.

The average annual return for the currency portfolio was around 1.45%pa compared to 5.66%pa for Treasury Bills and 8.63%%pa for Bonds.

Significantly the volatility of the currency portfolio was approaching that of long-term bonds (7.98% compared to 10.79% for Long bonds).

Investing in currencies involves risk but not positive expected return hardly suitable for "stability".
 
In my opinion it is true that without further information or forecasts about future developments it makes no sense to invest in foreign currency baskets just in order to earn returns (or diversification).
But once you invest into a commodity basket (said to be traded in USD) you actually invest into the "currency" "commodity basket" which is no longer USD. If the currency basket index has a return of 20% in USD it could have a return in EUR of 10% because the EUR has strengthened.
Beeing EUR consumer it would be interesting for me to have a further long position in EUR relative to the "currency" "commodity basket". Since resources are bought not only in the United States but in all countries of the world it should be traded in the "currency" "currency basket". The price in USD is only the price for a North American consumer. So it would be interesting to have the possibility to invest into an ETF with strategy EUR long Currency Basket short.
Could anyone acknowledge this argumentation?
Could you please inform about existing ETFs with this strategy? Thanks in advance.